Pop may be great, but it's useless if you need to run Final Cut Pro. macOS is wonderful, but not if you want to play a lot of AAA games. Windows is fine, but if you are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails you may have an easier path on some Linux distro.
These error conditions are where operating systems differ so greatly from each other. On one end of the spectrum you have open source operating systems. When you encounter some error condition, you spend your time researching solutions. In the extreme, you modify whatever isn't working to your tastes on your own. On the other end of the spectrum you have fully locked down operating systems like iOS. Here when something goes wrong, you instead decide how to adapt your use of the device to avoid whatever issue you encountered.
What happens when things go wrong is what drives me to one OS or another, and is usually what is relevant in these discussions.
However, I've been burned _1000_ too many times for almost all of my development work (the sole exceptions have been Go and Java). But writing Python was a nightmare, last I checked (although this was prior to the full deprecation of Python2). Since then, I run an easily repeatable, tight-knit developer VM that I ssh into (or run graphical if absolutely necessary, like to handle oauth flows), and I literally do not notice any difference. It's as if it were native macOS (with the exception that I'm not running shared folders, so some files don't exist as far as Finder is concerned).
Beyond that many of us enjoy not running operating systems attached to overpriced hardware and/or organizations that legitimately spy on their users through their "OS".
My point is that OP says they don't "get" why people have opinions on OSes and then goes on to state how Pop_OS is "useless" if you want to run niche commercial software.
I mean if OSes don't matter then I guess one doesn't need Final Cut Pro. Kdenlive or OpenShot should be just fine, right? I find that sort of argument disheartening and it is because it diminishes the free and polished options we have at our disposal.
The phrase "good enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as people have different priorities. For some people, having their dev environment broken by updates is a huge negative, something MacOS has done to myself and others frequently over the past few years. Others, like myself, don't care so much and so indeed MacOS is "good enough" for me but certainly not for everyone.
Sure, each of the “big three” work well enough these days for most tasks, but there’s more to it than just compatibility.
macOS has pretty unobtrusive systems in place for code signing and only running software from known vendors.
Linux has code-signing, in that it exists as a technology, but it’s not ubiquitously supported and you don’t get a centralised service vouching for recognised vendors out of the box (which makes sense as it kind of goes against the libre ethos - but it’s not a great situation for many users).
Windows supports gaming and most desktop software, but the security system (last I checked - please tell me if I’m way out of date on this) isn’t granular enough to cater to what you may or may not be comfortable with - so a lot of software will just trigger a UAC prompt for carte-blanche admin rights, which is as dangerous as you imagine.
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Windows is better at this and Linux of course shines depending on which distro you pick. I consider each distro its own OS. For the same reason gnome doesn't work for me (and thus PopOS doesn't) but KDE and i3 do.
But other people have other priorities. And the software you want to run heavily factors into it.
From what you’ve said, gnome and kde is something. From my limited experience with them, the major difference that Mac can’t do is the menu bar or Windows style bottom bar as different options. Mac does stick with the top menu bar as something always there (though you can hide it in newer versions). Most other things can be customized in Mac as well. A lot may require 3rd party apps on Mac to achieve though.
I’ve had multiple Mac users have a hard time using my main Mac because of how I’ve customized it to my liking.
Another thing is SSH access. I want to permit only public key access to my SSH daemon. Since about 10.12 or so (when SIP really started taking effect), macOS has been removing my changes from /private/etc/ssh/sshd_config and dumping them on the desktop when upgrades were done, in a passive-agressive way of saying "keep your shit to yourself". Not sure if it's even still possible to do this now with the sealed system volume because by the time Mojave and Big Sur came out I was already off the platform in terms of personal use.
Caffeinate (a CLI command to keep the machine awake) and a tool to constantly move the mouse (Jiggler) combined did work, but this is too hacky for my liking. If I want my OS not to do sleep of any kind, I should be able to tell it so.
Customisation with Gnome and Mac is possible but requires a ton of third-party tools which are often broken by system upgrades. I've tried all that both on Gnome and Mac but I got too annoyed with things constantly breaking. As a user wishing for great amounts of customisation you are clearly an undesirable on the platform.
I've used Mac as a daily driver from 10.2 until 10.14 or so, and I've had enough of these issues over the years that I just gave up on it. I still use every OS under the sun every day :) Because of work. But my main driver is FreeBSD + KDE and I like it a lot better.
Yeah agree with SIP stuff. I don’t have that stuff turned on. Im on Catalina and Big Sur so I also have wanted stuff like you said and do that. However I completely agree with you. I expect at some point MacOS won’t let me even semi easily edit stuff like that. It’ll be like iOS which I jailbreak usually and then customize ssh etc. however iOS 15 also has newer SIP sort of things that now mean jailbreaking won’t be allowed to edit the root file system.
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I was thinking the things that would be brought up would be random geeky sort of stuff. Like the plethora of apps I use on Mac (usually procrastinating) that let me do quite a bit without putting into much time. Like alt tab alternative app, using keyboard as much as possible, keyboard maestro and apple script for GUI automation, etc.
Not saying Linux can’t do all that. I was more thinking in situations like that are comparable.
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I do want to try FreeBSD soon one day. Hopefully this will push me to prioritize that.
And that's exactly the problem - macOS and Windows don't have "packages" in the sense that they do in Linux distributions. You can install software on both, of course, but it's relatively speaking a mess and Homebrew / Chocolately don't really suffice to make the experience anywhere nearly as clean and consistent as it is on literally any Linux distribution.
Other than that, I would agree, though for computer experts I would argue that Linux gives you the ability to fully understand how your system functions and control it at every level, and that this can be valuable. It's also a lot easier to use primarily open-source software on Linux. On the other hand, Linux can't run a lot of proprietary programs that are readily available on other systems.
When there is FLOSS, it is very common to also have feelings and ideology mixed in. It is very common for "FLOSS people" to evaluate software beyond familiarity and technical merits.
It's often impenetrable despite its being open source.